Animating rope

Olli. · Jul 2011

Does anyone have any idea how to animate rope in 3ds max

in my case, the rope is basically a strap that is attached to my character and i want it to move realistically with my animations.

I've found a bunch of cheap ways to achieve this, including spline deformation, IK rigs, but none of this works properly with what i want.

The rope is attached to the character at both ends.

Mark Dygert · Jul 2011

Simulate cloth on a simplified single sided strip of polys, skinwrap your rope to it. If you're exporting to a game engine you want to attachment constrain a few dummy points to the surface of the cloth sim, skin your rope to some free floating bones and use Jim Jaggers animate align script to get the bones to follow the dummies along as they follow the cloth sim around.

I wrote up a detailed step by step tutorial in case the general theory makes sense but the steps are new ground for people.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1021761#post1021761

bobford84 · Jun 2012

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brW7p_D4AU8

styx · Jun 2012

Maybe this script is what you are looking for:
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/spring-magic

Olli. · Jun 2012

hmm thanks guys, but this thread is like a year old.

Abby3D · Jun 2012

An IK bone chain should work. Link the first bone to the character's hand, so it moves with the character. You'll have to animate the rope by rotating the bones (use local rotation). You can save the animations and re-load them, just as with biped.

Animating rope

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